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Thursday, October 29, 2009

Q&A

Q: What's probably the best part of having your own office?

A: The freedom to close the door & fart away.

Other topic of the day......why a certain state & their registration department can eat a bag of dicks right now. A big one. Huge. Enormous bag of slimy, herpes-infected dicks. How can they give you $600 in tickets for not having registration when you DO have registration just not the sticker because their department is SLOW & HASN'T MAILED IT DO YOU YET? If need be, I'm going to court over this bullshit.

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Know Better and Learn Faster*

*The newest Thao disc is really good. As a whole, I think better than the previous.

Continuing on. What I should be doing right now is looking up allocations or reading chapters about Immunology, Vaccinations, & all that fun stuff. Instead, I'm Facebook-stalking guys I've had at least one date with since becoming single, attempting to conjure at least one redeeming quality about each one of them. It's kind of hard.

Professor: Great knowledge of art. (if he wasn't "humbly bragging" about one thing, it was another & made some pretty uncomfortable promises & plans early on: WARNING. also, sent me an email about 3 weeks after meeting explaining that he met this really swell girl named J & hopes we can still be friends.....by this point, I'd been uninterested for about a week & a half for several reasons, the main being that he a couple times pumped me with alcohol, another warning sign that I do not take lightly...also turns out that he's that guy who went on 18 dates in 25 days or something & was not yet divorced...other than that, he was a good person to be friends with)

Mono: He had good taste in wine. (remember, the dude who wanted to have a talk about not wanting a relationship but that we would stay monogamous less than 6 weeks after meeting)

25YO: Ridiculously good-looking. (again, 6 weeks in he wanted to have a talk at which point I looked him right in the face & said "is this a joke? I ASKED you not to come over tonight, I was at the ballet studio for 3 hours, over one of which was Pointe.....you pulled me out of a bath with no dinner to talk with me about something that I flat out said was pointless to talk about?"....I'm an idiot & continued to have little dates with him & actually went along with being his friend for a couple months afterwards, at which point it was so incredibly clear how much of an idiot the kid was that he was no longer worth looking at)

Dorchester: Ridiculously good-looking. (this one was a legit friend dating thing, no funny business, honestly, the kid is really, really sweet, just totally fucked in the head after years of being abused & washing it down with copious amounts of booze (we're not talking a bottle of wine/night here)....which is probably why after talking with him for 5 minutes I felt more maternal towards him than anything else & Oedipal I am not, that's gross)

Underware: Originally bonded over love of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia & how hilarious Day/Night Man is. (see post from 5.12.09 & 8.1.09: no more needs to be said about that)

Triathlete: Really great body. (Quickly realized that you can learn a lot from a Facebook profile. He has 14 profile pictures in which he isn't wearing a shirt...and not like he was hanging out with a bunch of people on a beach, more like him shirtless doing a push-up with his niece & nephew on his back or him shirtless holding a bulldog staring off into space: it was weird. Soon there-after also realized that he only did & would think about himself since he first, didn't take me on a date to somewhere that I would like & second, stopped by my back porch twice while I was in Seattle & I found out because he texted me "you're not reading on your back porch, I stopped by" & "was at your back porch, you're not here"....No shit, dude, get a clue)

So here we are, a yearish later. Why write this out? To remind myself not to keep making the same mistakes because despite relief at the end, egos get bruised & when it comes right down to it I need to take care of me first.

Waiter (I'm trying to use real names until it's shat the bed because someone kind of alluded that the nicknames could be construed as Samantha Jonesish & offensive) asked me out on Sunday night. Specifically for an exhibit at the ICA for Thursday night. That's tonight. No call, nothin'. Ain't no thang. I'll just go to ballet or maybe call Neighbor Jesse to see if she'd like to go for a really long walk tonight. It's disappointing a little bit but at least I'm finding these things out now. Even before going out on a date, no less. Oh well. I can get the attention from Cos tonight at class. Gotta love a ballet teacher who cares about his students' self esteem.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

About Goddamn Time (3 of 3)

Around the end of June, a neighbor & I became acquainted with each other over taking out the trash on a Thursday night. As a surgeon, he's busy & being me, well, I'm busy too so our paths very rarely crossed. Usually to just talk trash.

Nice guy. Sweet. We hung out one night over a bottle of wine & good music. Later that week I found some rare Ben Folds ceedees in my mailbox from him. The next week we went to the latest Woody Allen. A glimmer of hope & interest but it just kind of wasn't there. You know? Still, a new friend never hurts.

Famous last words.

It was clear when he showed up at my birthday party (weekend before my birthday) with an enormous box of Modern Pastry that he was interested. At my birthday dinner (the actual night), he showed up & took me out for a while afterwards when the rest of the group headed back to their places for slumber.

Still, something felt missing.

About a week later he asked if I'd like to see another movie. Transformers? No. Some other action flick? No. How about we decide on Thursday? Fine. He told me that he got me something. I said to please stop buying things. He said that it was a birthday present & nothing big. Okay. He told me to remind him to give it to me on Thursday. And again, I reminded that I wasn't interested in anything but friendship.

When 500 Days of Summer came up, I was quite delighted to meet after ballet (is this a trend? seriously) for a film & dinner.

The movie was great. By being clear that I was solely interested in friendship, I made sure to pay my own way. Afterwards we went to Grendel's for dinner. Good conversation. Friend stuff. Laughing. Joking. This was a nice friend meeting. Maybe it could grow into more. He's great!

So he drove me home & I hopped out with a hug. About 94 seconds after getting in the door, I got a call.

Surgeon: You forgot your gift.

Me: Oh yeah! Whoops! (truth: i remembered to not remind him)

Surgeon: I'll swing back around.

So I walked out into a downpour. Stood outside the car. He said "no, come sit down I want you to open this up". So I did.

There was a card, which said something like "party on your birthday but remember that it causes damage, just look at this poor guy". Opening up the card, I found a mirror. Woah. That was weird & inappropriate. Reading the card, I found out some philosophical views I might not agree with. Namely that his advice to a 30-year-old was to realize that happiness is something you have to work hard at. Hhhmmm....

Whatever. So I reached into the bag & pulled out a ballet skirt. This floored me. How incredibly thoughtful? I felt like I'd over-thought and rationalized way too much. This amazing guy who isn't just a marathon-runner, yacht-racer, but listens to me & is thoughtful. Thoughtful. Wow.

So I leaned over and said "thank you for this! I've been meaning to buy another one" giving him a hug. He said "well, if it doesn't fit, we could take it back for a new size". Totally over-thought. Then I held up the skirt to see it more clearly. And rather than the ballet skirt I thought it was originally, found that it had a top with a skirt.

It's a nightie.

Immediately, I said something like "whattheidon'tohmygottago" and skipped out of the car & to my apartment. By skip, I mean sprint.

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Next Move

Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Four Cousins and a Funeral: October Theme: Mischief

I wrote this for the other blog I've been contributing to. Go here to visit & see what other kinds of Mischief people are getting into.

The word mischief conjures thoughts of kittens with rolls of toilet paper, puppies with shoes, young children devising a plan to steal cookies from the cookie jar, and mostly, my brother, Ian, and cousin, Scott.

Growing up, Ian and Scott acted like typical little boys. Now, in their 20s, they still act like typical little boys. And let me tell you, it’s enchanting. Something magical happens when we’re all together. By “we”, I mean Ian, Scott, Jenifer (another cousin), and me. Some of my happiest childhood memories include seeing how many stairs we could jump down and land (our parents yelling in the background that if we broke our legs, they would not feel sorry for us), zooming down our grandparents’ driveway on tricycles and straight out into the street (this one really irritated the elders due to every documented match of “child vs. car” ending in a child’s defeat), learning how to ride horses at my aunt’s farm in the countryside of Southeast Iowa, and spending hours playing on our grandfather’s old crank telephone. As an adult now, some of my happiest grown up moments are with Scott, Ian, and Jenifer. We each have very distinct and different personalities. Ian is fun and care-free. Scott is thoughtful and fatherly. Jenifer is the humanitarian and sensitive. I’m artsy/nerdy and worry warty. We come together to fit like a puzzle.

Ten years ago my grandfather died. So like every January for Family Christmas, we piled into a car and drove from Chicago to Fairfield, Iowa. Only it was August and the usual laughing would be replaced with considerable amounts of crying. Per usual, Dad would try to beat his driving time and I could count on the biggest, warmest hugs from my aunts, the most maternal women I’ve ever met in my life. I think it’s because of their enormous breasts and smell of pie.

Upon arriving, we were greeted by sad, yet relieved, family members. No one wanted Grandpa Stanley (yes, I have family members named things like Stanley, Millard, and Norma…..we’re from the Midwest, what do you expect?) to go but he was in excruciating pain. One of the most difficult experiences in life is seeing a loved one active and able in nature stuck in bed and miserable.

The whole family had dinner together and went our separate ways. Separate ways in our family means that Ian, Scott, Jen & I split off from the group & find ways to entertain ourselves. What was tricycles and horses has since been replaced with pot and pool tables. Unfortunately, Jen wasn’t in town yet so she would be missing out on the evening’s activities.

Back at Aunt Sharon & Uncle Millard’s farm Ian, Scott & I decided we should take the golf cart out for a while that night. It was a hot night. The Midwest gets very hot in the summer. Hot and muggy and sticky and buggy. It’s gross. So we get to a kind of clear area between cornfields off the road a little bit and that’s when the fun begins. True to form, Ian pulls out a glass pipe and a bag of pot. Because, well, that’s just what you do in a cornfield at night.

He packs it up & we start passing it around.

Me: Hey, this pipe is clean right? Not like last Christmas when you had us smoking out of that pipe you & your friends were smoking opium out of, right? That fucked me up and made me trip. Tomorrow’s Grandpa’s wake & I really don’t want to look all strung out for our grandfather’s wake.

Me: (took a hit, coughed and immediately felt that euphoric tingling you get from good pot)

We sat out in the cornfield for a while, talking, reminiscing, and mostly laughing. At one point we realized it was getting pretty late & figured we should head back before the more paranoid elders decided to come looking for us. So we started driving back to Sharon & Millard’s.

Ian: Uh, there isn’t barely any juice left in this and we need to get up that hill.

Scott: I told you that before we left.

Ian: Did you? I forgot. Wait. I know! We could go down this hill over here, gain momentum and up over that way.

Scott: Good idea. Here, I’ll hold the flashlight while you drive.

Ian: Nah, this is more fun without the flashlight. I don’t need that thing.

Scott: K.

Me: Are you crazy, dumdum? Please, put the flashlight up.

Ian: Don’t get all paranoid on us now, sissy. You just sit in the back & stay chilled. (still giggling like a 4-year-old on a sugar buzz)

Please note that my brother, cousin & I each other names as a term of endearment. I call them “muffins” and “shitbags” and they call me a “sissy” and “dork”. It’s equally embarrassing for all parties involved.

So along we rode down the hill laughing & enjoying each others company. In my head I remember thinking…wow, Ian’s right, this is superfun I have so much fun with him I miss my little brother when I’m at college and Scott too I sure love those two this is really fun yay wheeeee and tomorrow we’ll see Jen and then we’ll all be together again that’ll be the best I can’t wait hold on are we slowing down what the hell hope we have enough power to get up the.

STOP.

We just stopped at the bottom of the hill. The golf cart hadn’t hit anything. It just slowed quickly and stopped. Damnit. So we finally pulled out the flashlight to see what was going on.

Upon turning on the huge portable light-providing gadget we discovered that we were staring a fallen tree in the face. Like, the branches were literally 3 feet from the front of the golf cart and at our eye-level and ready to do some serious damage to our peepholes.

Simultaneously, our 3 stoned jaws dropped, looked at each other, tipped our heads back towards the sky and said “thank you grandpa”.

Quietly and calmly, as if respecting the situation, we decided that I would steer while Ian & Scott pushed the cart up the hill. I insisted that we keep the flashlight on. There was no argument against me this time.

**Please note that picture was taken during our last family vacation (family vacation=Scott, Ian, & me) in August near Seattle……on the top of a mountain…..with a drop off directly behind us……and I’m paralyzingly afraid of heights (my palms are sweating while I write this)……so they sedated me with red wine....and yes, my hand not holding wine is clutching a rock for security